Recently new top-notch smartphones
from Apple and Nokia advent has blown the Internet as well as notorious law
patent cases happened during the relentless war between Apple and Samsung. I
will start from the former. I’ve watched presentations of Nokia Lumia 920 and
iPhone 5, I also know the capabilities of Samsung GIII. First and foremost, I’m
not an Apple fanatic who tries to jump on the bandwagon and stands in long
lines for the first sales of its production, nor anti-Apple freak who has some
complexes towards Apple and try to post everywhere anti-Apple posts showing his
hate with every fibre of his being. The devices I currently use are: Macbook 13
inches i5, iPad 2 and HTC Sensation. I also used to have Samsung Galaxy Tab and
HTC Desire S.
I’ve always been outspoken person
regarding the gadgets and I have no intentions to take any side in the arguing
between Apple zealots and anti-Apple… zealots too btw, since hating Apple became
the same religion as to be infatuated by Apple. I wish everyone to stop being
childish and buy what you like without hating others who prefer something
different. But one thing that makes me
chuckle is how other developers try to present some «important» functions as an advantage which makes and ramp
up a confidence that this is some kind of important features that them better
than iPhone, and every Tom, Dick and Harry immerse themselves into the holy
wars against Apple zealots showing them that «Apple doesn’t have this, doesn’t have that». However when I start to thoroughly
check what those advantages are, I start to think that I’m in the some kind of
a loony-bin, because people post some functions but don’t know what they mean
or they don’t even ponder about whether they ever need them, the advantages
actually don’t look so lucid for most of the users, they just buy embellished
reviews without having a clear insight of what they’ve seen in those reviews.
For example Lumia 920 has wireless
charge, «excellent,
iPhone sucks!» - the
average anti-Apple Internet warrior exclaims! And for sure, such cogent
argument sounds very persuasive, wireless charge that is sooo damn cool! But
now let’s try to think of it better using a bit more coherent approach and put
the same point more succinctly, what is wireless charger basically is? It’s a
charger box which u need to plug in anyway (or charge it via plugger), it’s
quite big and not comfortable to carry it with you and your phone would have to
be in a fixed position anyway while charging, so what’s the advantage? That
actually makes it even more uncomfortable, cos u need to pay extra money for
the charge box which lessens comfort of charging. Evidently, if I would be able
to plug that box and it would charge my phone while I can roam at my apartments
with my phone, that would be a real breakthrough and worth feature, because I
will never forget to charge my phone since it would be enough just to bring him
at my apartment and no matter where I left it in the nighttime while I sleep
and no matter that I came home sloshed for instance after some party and I
obviously would forget to plug it. Regardless of what happened, in the morning
I will take 100% charged phone. However there is no such technology thus far.
But the average Joe doesn’t care about such minor details, he just perceives
the magic words «wireless
charge» and it warms
his heart.
Second «advantage» of Lumia, 10 hours 3G talking against 8 hours
of iPhone 5. That’s great will exclaim again a consumer. Well let’s again look
at this «advantage»
a bit more plausibly.
Smartphones take a lot of energy, and in order to not have any problems, you
anyway need to charge it everyday, sometimes even twice a day, because the
Internet surfing which takes a lot of time discharge the battery in no time. So
what basically give those 2 hours of talking if both Lumia and iPhone 5 anyway
needed to be charged every day? Basically nothing. Unless of course you talk 10
hours every day, are you? Another misleading feature has been busted.
Optical stabilization? Haha that’s
funny, first of all an average user doesn’t even know what it is, the average
Joe just hears such clever words and thinks that it’s cool but hasn’t the least
clue what does that actually mean, let alone the fact that the average Joe doesn’t
even know what is ‘’optical’’ and it’s needless to even ask him to write any
Fresnel equation. In fact, all phones
have to some extent the optical stabilization, the difference is only in
technologies and I also can’t say that it actually helps u so much. If we talk
about real cameras like Canon, then for sure, but phone is phone, even when it
is «smart» phone it’s still not a camera and
current smartphones including Lumia make the pictures with basically the same
quality and btw Nokia only now finally grasped how to make decent cameras and
now they boast about it like it’s some sort of a revolution. Sounds really
silly, what Apples, HTC and Samsung achieved 3-4 years ago, now tries to be
passed as an advantage and breakthrough by Nokia. Dear Finnish guys are u
seriously so dumb? Or you think that we are idiots? It’s like if some
automobile company will present a new car and will say that «we have a great advantage, we got a
safety airbag in our new cars!», the automobile drivers would start to
laugh at your face about such «argument» since all cars already have it. And I’m now laughing at your face
with your boasting about your cool camera; welcome to the Earth guys, FYI we
all already have normal cameras. But well, it’s hard to refute the fact that it’s
better now than never of course, from that standpoint you did a great job.
Another typical argument, «more camera megapixels», this is in fact very misleading
parameter. To understand why it is misleading one should have a basic grasp
what characteristics allow to achieve better quality of the cameras, the
developers who write their reviews for ordinary consumers don’t bother
themselves to show you the robes and they just write the amount of megapixels
and the average Joe thinks that the higher number of megapixels, better quality
of the picture will be and to some extent it is true, however the Devil is in
the details.
What is megapixel? Megapixel it is a
parameter that determines angular resolution of the camera matrix. Camera
matrix is a chip that consists of sensitive to light elements and photodiodes.
So the bigger physical size of the matrix allows to make higher resolution and
increase the number of megapixels. Matrix has 3 basic parameters –
signal-to-noise ratio (Psignal / Pnoise), sensitivity and
resolution. The second and the third can be set, while the first one derives
out of the set parameters (there are exceptions though but we are talking about
the basic principles here which are known for every person who graduated
technical university regardless of the major). Signal-to-noise ration
determines the quality of the picture and that ratio should be as high as
possible, in other words Psignal should exceed Pnoise
both parameters highly depend on resolution and sensitivity. Therefore in order
to achieve higher quality of the pictures it’s not enough to increase the
resolution (and consequently the amount of megapixels) but u need to change the
matrix size, cos u can’t set many megapixels in a small matrix. Smartphones
generally have relatively the same matrix size and it’s not feasible to make it
significantly bigger without increasing the overall size of the phone. While if
you try to set too high resolution in a small matrix it actually may cause
diminishing the quality because Pnoise will increase. So basically
when u see that smartphone has more than 5 megapixels camera, that is most
likely a simple marketing move but not real improvement. You can notice that
after 5 megapixels there is already no significant difference in quality, and this
is because the actual size of the matrix (regardless of what amount of
megapixels developers wrote in the characteristics) remains exactly the same.
So when you see that some phone has «8.3 megapixels or 9 for example and this is higher than iPhone’s 8»,
u may be sure that it's BS, why it is BS I explained above.
What else we have? Ahhh yes,
display. 4.5 against 4 and slightly better resolution. I will comment the
latter first. The difference between 1280x768 and 1136x640 is essentially
almost uncatchable for a human’s eye, perhaps some specialist in graphics and photographs
will notice it, but since when all consumers became specialists in that field?
99% of them don’t give a damn on such minor difference and won’t even notice
it. As for 4.5 inches display, that’s a laughable advantage. Have you ever
heard about the pads? Well people who really need a big screen can use pads,
and phone is phone, it’s not a shovel you know (or you want to dig the sand
with it?), the size of a display should be balanced to make it comfortable to
hold in one hand. So here we have quite subjective argument since people have
different preferences, one likes a bit bigger screen, another likes lesser
screen it’s a matter of taste and personal preferences and hardly can be called
as an advantage. To me personally 4 inches is more comfortable than 4.5, I’m
saying it from my experience of possessing the phones with both display sizes,
because it makes to scribble down the message or some note quicker, yes of
course 4.5 display would better for watching videos, but for me both 4.5 and 4
are not suitable for videos, I prefer to take my iPad or Macbook and watch it
with better quality if we talk about movies.
And well I can actually comment all
other so-called features like standard plugger contrary to the Apple’s not
standard or near field communication systems, but you can do it on your own if
you start to think about it in more details.
How exactly the standard plugger helps? When u forgot your own and you
can ask from someone else? Well from my experience with HTC, I had to go and
buy the new one when I was forgetting it in my business trips abroad, because u
need a charger every day anyway, and nobody can provide it for you for so long,
besides, Apple is enough popular product so actually you can always find
someone who has that charger, so what’s the big idea? There is nothing to shout
about, standard charger doesn’t provide any advantage.
So what is important in the phones
then if you ask me? Well let’s think what made a real revolution when
smartphones were released? Cameras? Nope. Touch screen? Partly, but now all
phones have it. But the most important feature was [b]operational system[/b].
Operational system gave an opportunity for more comfortable information
obtaining and dozens of features like pocket dictionaries, news portals,
messengers, shops, journals and so on and so on. So why Apple is so beloved by
many users? Exactly, because of its cutting-edge operational system. I have an
iPad and Android phone HTC so I know very well both markets. Android so far
simply can’t hold a candle to iOS and its Google Play market is inferior to the
AppStore, many of those services which AppStore was providing 2-3 years ago and
provides now still don’t exist in Android, let alone the fact that almost all
Android applications has been taken from the AppStore and adjusted to Android
and even such applications are worse than exactly the same applications from
AppStore, they are either very buggy, or have less functions. For example check
the Longman dictionary application from AppStore and from Android? It’s as
different as day and night, and my Android application doesn’t even have
regular fix upgrades, less functions and less comfortable for usage, while the
same AppStore application is regularly updated and have duly made comfortable
interface. Many other applications that are worth to have, don’t even exist in Android,
like iTunes University for instance. Many appeared just recently like
Instragram for instance. I’m not even talking about Android’s forced closes,
crashes, freezings, and lags that happen almost on a daily basis, whereas iOS
doesn’t have such problems so frequently and has very robust system that
doesn’t bug a lot comparing to Android. And what about Lumia? Well if you check
the presentations of it (there are loads of them on YouTube), you won’t see any
showing Windows Store apps, you know why? Cos that market is still almost
empty. And what is smartphone without good applications store? Basically
nothing, it’s a worthless piece of plastic, you can go and buy non-smartphone
and u won’t notice too many differences.
So far the only advantage of the
non-Apple smartphones it an easy music uploading, while in iPhone u need to
convert the tracks via iTunes which sometimes is annoying especially when u
need to copy just one song and have to launch iTunes because of that. That’s
basically why I still have HTC Sensation, however I don’t listen to music like
I used to right now, I prefer now to listen audiobooks or live podcasts and for
that Apple is much better, so most likely I will buy iPhone 5.
So what’s
the conclusion? The overall conclusion is quite simple, developers who so far
can’t develop better operational system for smartphones than Apple try to
misguide people by useless functions or minor differences hoping that scarcely
the average Joe will hear some clever words he will start to think that it’s
better, typical market move to mislead the users. I’m fully aware about the Apple production
drawbacks, and the main of them is the format policy which makes it more
difficult to watch videos or listen to music, and you should spend more money
on applications and services there however the Apple haters have to face the
fact that in terms of the service and quality that Apple provides, it’s the
best company right now and their «evolutional» Nokias
or Samsungs can’t hold a candle to the iOS and AppStore service, and this is
the core feature of any smartphone, while the features which are more
advantageous in other phones are basically either practically useless or too
minor to notice it. Email, taking photos, web browsing, texting, and placing
calls are the primary functions to many and could care less about extra
features. Tech specs are a foreign language for most «average users». While application store, operation system and
design are the things that are important for an ordinary user, and that what makes
them the crucial features.Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/samsung-attacks-iphone-5-in-new-galaxy-s3-print-ad/#ixzz26ik1UDkO
In the end I also would like to add some comments regarding the recent events about Apple and Samsung litigation. What happened basically didn’t surprise me at all. I posted in Twitter that pic:
But I posted it not as an anti-Apple
pic, but to firstly show the Western hypocrisy when they talk about so-called «free trade» mainly referring to the David Ricardo theory
but act in a different manner, in other words they sing to jig and dance to
church music. And to show stupidity of the Third World countries who think that
they will be the same prosperous once they get rid of any trade barriers and
gladly eliminating them. What American court did was very right decision; they
protected its own American company from the possible competitor from another
country i.e. South Korea. Every country with the sane market approach would do
exactly the same. Wake up third world people, there is no free market, it doesn’t
exist, and unless you understand it, your countries will always remain inferior
in technologies. You think it’s only Apple does it? Well let’s check the recent
news:
Just yesterday Acer was getting ready to unleash its CloudMobile
smartphone on the Chinese public sporting an equally local (and equally not
Android) Aliyun operating system. According to Reuters, however, when
journalists turned up for the launch event today, an Alibaba (who make Aliyun)
spokesperson told them the launch had been cancelled, before later releasing a
statement saying Acer had received pressure from Google to pull the launch. The
competing OS manufacturer claims that the Acer was told product collaborations
and Android authorization would cease if the product was released. So far
Google has declined to comment, but if true, represents some significant strong
arming, in what is clearly a significant market. We have reached out to Google
for comment ourselves. More as we know it.
Sources :
Aliyun is a smartphone operation
system created by Chinese based on Linux. Look how Google pressures Acer to not
let the possible competitor to penetrate the market and squeeze it from the
Chinese market. And as I’ve already mentioned above, the operation system is a
core feature of any smartphone, the hardware has less importance to the
software right now since all companies already learned how to make decent
hardware, however there are not many operational systems with good quality
available. And those who try to make them, are always severely challenged and
challenged by the current monopolists.
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